Education Writer

Inside: How to stop relational aggression is one of the biggest challenges facing schools and parents. What is it? Why does it happen? How can we stop it?

In schools, we talk constantly about protecting girls from harm. We teach them about paedophiles, online grooming, sexting, and the harm caused by drug and alcohol use. In reality, the more likely destructive influence on an adolescent girl’s day to day life is the damage they do to one another in their friendship groups… Relational aggression.

Relational aggression is the psychologist’s name for what the rest of us call ‘mean girls’ behaviour, or straight up ‘bitchiness’. It is a pattern of behaviour typically played out by school age girls, but it is not exclusive to them. In fact, where do they learn it if not from their adult role models? Adults are just more subtle about it.

Chances are, you’ve experienced relational aggression. You know it when it happens to you. It’s an emotional slap in the face and you often feel a sense of shame and confusion. What distinguishes relational aggression from just being mean, is that it focuses on damaging a person’s sense of social place. I see it as using relationships as weapons.

Relational aggression may include:

Exclusion

Gossip

The silent treatment

Belittling (Often hidden behind the expression ‘just joking’)

Conditional friendship

The first four are self-explanatory, but ‘conditional friendship’ is more difficult. The child knows there are unspoken rules about behaviour and ‘going along’ with the group. It is why many lovely girls behave very poorly. Inclusion is incredibly important to their developing psyche and they will do anything to remain within the inner circle.

Relational aggression is about power and exclusion and it can be very destructive. It has nothing to do with friendship, yet many people see it as a normal aspect of young girls’ relationships. It has become normalised and it shouldn’t be. The terminology around it is often softened. It is referred to in schools as ‘friendship issues’, and in society, we say things like, “That’s just girls”.

Why does relational aggression happen?

Part of being an adolescent is finding your place in social networks. Your peers become incredibly important and there is less focus on parents and significant adults. As a result, impressing and belonging become very important. Traditionally boys have achieved this pecking order with physical strength and humour. Girls use their communication and interpersonal skills.

Girls learn from a very young age that when you create exclusion you create inclusion. And if you can knock someone else off balance emotionally, it defines you as balanced. It is an interesting, if not disturbing, phenomena to watch in a schoolyard. From the cliques of socially elite ‘it’ girls to the mixed mob of outsiders, there is a power dynamic constantly at play. None of this has anything to do with friendship. Hence the creation of the term ‘frenemies’.

Another feature of this form of aggression is that most kids get a turn. You can be in the inner circle one day and then for no apparent reason, on the outer the next. Groups also work in formation with one another. If a child has been frozen out of one social group, they are unlikely to be accepted by another. It’s like watching a sick game of pinball with a confused hurt child being bounced from one group to another, deflected at every turn until it is their turn to be re-embraced by the ‘friendship group’.

Santa Maria College psychologist, Jane Carmignani, says that kids often know that what is happening is wrong, but they don’t have the language and confidence to stop it, even when they are the one being the mean girl. She says that in her office, girls will tell her about their mean behaviour and show remorse for it. So why do they keep going? The need to be mean comes from a place of fear, fear of not belonging or not being good enough.

This is not to say that girls don’t have genuine friendships, they do. Some kids are lucky enough and emotionally literate enough to enjoy relationships with genuine understanding, and empathy. They support one another and spend time sharing common interests. In my experience, these kids are usually involved in a lot of sport, have varied interests and are exposed to a lot of different people of varying ages. The focus is on participating and being involved. However, even these kids come face to face with relational aggression from time to time.

Relational aggression is the psychologist’s name for what the rest of us call ‘mean girls’ behaviour, or straight up ‘bitchiness’.

How is relational aggression managed?

Relational aggression is incredibly difficult to manage in a school. It is hard to see, it’s covert, often innocuous looking, and kids will deny it. It is very frustrating when a girl is being charming to you and you know that she is deeply upsetting another child. Sometimes she will lie to your face so often that she starts to believe the lie herself. A simple example is a girl posting an embarrassing photo of a ‘friend’ on Instagram or Snapchat. When confronted about it she will say, “But I thought she looked pretty”. Where do you go with that?

Making girls feel personally responsible is about the most effective technique that is used in schools. If the girls can sit with a psychologist or suitably equipped adult, as a group, and discuss what is happening and how it is making each person feel there is a chance that it can be resolved. If not the cycle just keeps on going.

What can parents do?

It isn’t all hopeless. This is learned behaviour and learned behaviour can often be unlearned. But there are commitments that need to be made by adults. We need to:

Make friendship cool. Modelling by adults is the most powerful way of doing that. Talk about the great qualities of your friends to your kids. Too often we niggle at our friends’ weaknesses instead of verbally celebrating their greatness.

Explicitly teach kindness, compassion and empathy. We know kids have the capacity for these qualities. They are often evident at home or with people of different ages, but they are not being engaged in their relationships with peers. We need to make sure they turn their empathy on.

Explicitly teach emotional intelligence. Help kids recognise who is loyal and who is safe. Talk to them about relational aggression. They should be able to recognise it and name it.

Teach kids to be:

Upstanders – These are people who stand up for victims. It’s been proven that if you can stand up to a bully for 8 seconds, they are likely to back down. Some kids are stronger than others. We need to make it cool to be strong and able to defend others.

Distracters – It is important that kids be able to recognise when a mean moment is coming and distract participants away from it. It’s a skill that adults eventually learn themselves, but if kids are given instruction on how to do this it can be learnt more quickly.

Supporters – Kids can be encouraged to do something as small as making eye contact with a victim while aggression is happening. That shows the victim that the behaviour is seen and acknowledged. It makes the victim seen and acknowledged. They aren’t alone.

Carefully manage online activity. A lot of relational aggression happens out of school hours, in cyberspace. Kids need a break from their friendship groups.

Talk to kids explicitly about friendship. Teach them that friendships evolve, that there is a difference between having friends and being popular and help them to understand what it means to have boundaries. I wrote an article to help parents talk to kids about friendship, that you can access here.

Create opportunities for children to meet lots of new people outside of school and get to know them well. I love sport for this reason and many more. Teammates are people you have to understand and communicate with. Assumptions about people get tested.

Please…. Never say, “That’s just girls”, or “boys will be boys” for that matter. We can be better than that. Or at least we can try.

Why not follow Linda’s fortnightly blog? You’ll receive useful information to help support your kids as they navigate their school years.

Linda Stade has worked in various teaching and management roles in education for twenty-five years. She has worked in government and private schools, country and city, single-sex and co-ed. Currently, she is the Research Officer at Santa Maria College, Western Australia.

Linda is currently writing an eBook about ‘Friends and Frenemies’ to further assist parents, teachers and people who work with kids. Subscribers to her blog will be notified when it is available.Sign-up here.

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Linda Stade

Linda Stade has worked in various teaching and management roles in education for twenty-five years. She has worked in government and private schools, country and city, single sex and co-ed. Currently she is the Research and Content Manager at Santa Maria College, Western Australia.

23 Comments

Really enjoyed reading this article. While we’ve seen that sports help insulate girls from social issues, we’ve also found that many girls are turning away from sports at a younger age than boys. It would be interesting to learn how labeling young girls “A,” “B,” or “C” influences their self esteem and/or confidence. My sense is that early bloomers are rewarded by being placed on the better teams and as a result, reap the benefits – bragging rights. In contrast, those placed on lower level teams are put in an inferior position. Too often we see that girls would rather leave a sport than move down a level, begging the question — why do we continue to label girls’ teams at the younger ages? Physically, kids change rapidly and who’s worst on a team can quickly become who’s best within a matter of months. So we are left with a conundrum — “cut” a kid and have her quit or keep her and don’t let the [now] more talented child join. The easiest solution is to mix teams and avoid/break up cliques so that team members benefit from playing up to the best player’s ability and girls are able to establish more relationships.

Unfortunately, in my experience, this applies as much to boys as girls. My eldest son has experienced being invited into different social groups and then totally rejected by those groups on several occasions. In the latest case this got to the point of being called over jovially then immediately told that no one in the group likes him and that he should go away. This group included a boy who he considered a close friend and who later apologised, suggesting they could still be friends . . . but not when he was with the group. I’ve spoken at length to my son who was deeply upset by this however the resilience and maturity he’s shown through this period has totally amazed me. This is a really excellent article which I’m going to show him – just to let him know he’s not alone. Thank you so much.

My son’s best friend has suddenly turned against him. He is mortified and has asked him a few times what he has done wrong, but still none the wiser. He had a horrible year at school last year with a manipulative not who made his life hell. They are in different classes and this year was looking positive…. but no. Feel helpless as unable to resolve for him. Hope this year improves as will start to affect his work. He is in year 6

I am Bethany’s 93 year old great grandfather. I see her only a few times a year but I am always impressed by her maturity and self confidence. It came as a considerable surprise to learn that she is having social problems and hope that her schoolmates will soon appreciate that she would be an acceptable member of their group. I assure them that she is a lovely girl. Give her a chance.

One of the reasons that I wanted to post this and asked my daughter’s permission, Mummy Lou, was to help others going through this during their school years. My daughter moved on from this group and did find friends to see her through the rest of H.S. Like anything in life, you have to be brave enough to move on to find where you belong.

It breaks my heart that things like this are happening in our schools today. I grew up in an era where kids all got along and the teachers were strict but fair. Now it is so different. Fear is everywhere and our kids are absorbing it like a sponge. Dysfunctional parents are raising their kids to hate instead of love. Bullies are becoming widespread. We need educators like Linda in our schools to help these kids become who they were created to be . To encourage and help the bullies out of the dark world they exist in. You do what you know and that has to change These kids need help and it’s our responsibility as citizens to see that they get it. More infuses on mental health at a younger age so it doesn’t get out of hand and that bullie has a chance to turn their life around and become something they can be proud of. Kids cannot learn or grow in a functional way when fear and hate is all they see and hear. I appreciate this post.

Lovely emotional yet strong poem. My daughter is 10 and goes through this. She is in the group, but is told that their ‘parents’ dont want her to join them socially..
she takes it so well on the whole, yet at times says she feels it would ne ‘nice at times’ to be invited to things. My heart breaks.. but can only hope she learns to be strong and deal with things. Xxx Have spoken to school who say they cant control dynamics out of school and the other parents… but as long as children are happy in school… yet it seems so unfait

My daughter is in year 8 now and has been through this the whole of year 7 and it is still happening.We went to the bullying mediator on a few occasions and she said to my daughter “this behaviour you are experiencing shouldnt be a problem now, maybe you could call it a problem if you were in infants,but you are not!”I was so cross at her reaction to what had happened to my daughter that i complained!She should read this article and maybe then she might understand that this behaviour is damaging at any age but particularly for girls of secondary age!My daughter has been so brave about the whole situation, and my Husband and i do our best to instill in her what a lovely person she is.She is constantly making new friends only to have them taken away ftom her again by the so called “cool” gang.She has no faith in the bullying mediator and so handles things by herself.These girls are so sly the way they try and upset her that if you tried to explain it to the teachers it would sound like you are being petty or trying to make trouble for the perpetrators!!My daughters troubles started just because she went out with another girl other than her regular friend!Her regular friend decided to tell everyone in their group about it and since that fateful day they have all gone out of their way to treat my daughter like this.I hope you can get your article into schools as i think teachers need to stop trivializing this sort of behaviour and face upto the fact that is a very common thing and perhaps come up with a way to deal with it.

Maybe you should consider a weekly therapist that is able to help your daughter through this. The support of a good therapist is so helpful for a child. They are able to build your child’s strength and belief in themselves which you can see is very evident in my daughter’s poem. One of the best decisions we ever made was getting her in therapy. Sometimes, the emotional connection between Mother and Child is just too intense. Having a 3rd Party can make a huge difference. The child absorbs and hears better some of the solutions for dealing with these problems. Just a suggestion! Don’t be afraid to discontinue with anyone that is not making this happen for your child. It takes time to find the person they will connect with to make it through.

It hurts more to see your child go through this than it would for any parent to go through this. No one deserves to be treated badly by friends. We all need to learn this through our early years so we don’t think twice about it in our later years. Critical judgment of others seems to be the way so many make it through these days. It’s the wrong way!!

This is great! Have passed it onto to my sister to help her and her tween daughters. Sadly, while reading it, have also recognised this behviour in some members of a local volunteer organisation, and they are adults who should know better!

This article has been useful to me. My daughter has been picked on by the same girl in her new school ( we relocated) since Year 1. Today, she’s in Year 4 and a recent ordeal occurred when she sarbotaged her school work. The school has been informed but has done very little about it. The child denied, again, like the previous years, for any wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, this child’s mother, whom I consider a friend does not take it well- gossip, silent treatment etc as per your points.

I’ve advised my daughter to avoid this child and walk away . Am I doing the right thing?

If only this behaviour stopped at childhood/teen years.
I am a victim of this at the age of 40!
They even sent a card to my home to mock me.
I was that girl then, bullied and shunned…
it hurts – and it never goes away.
I wish I had had therapy.

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Linda Stade has worked in various teaching and management roles in education for over twenty-five years. She has worked in government and private schools, country and city, single sex and co-ed. Currently she is the Research Officer at Santa Maria College, Western Australia